Craft cocktails from the best bars in Copenhagen

New Cocktail Lounge transcends menus

Kyros & Co.

February 27, 2019by Jiri Malis

Unlike many other newly-opened bars, Kyros & Co. doesn’t build on any prior venues’ established reputation. Instead, it creates how it’s perceived from scratch. It’s very hard to start at the foot of this climb. Kyros, however, aims for the summit.

Readying the space to host a bar has taken laborious months, but starting from their imagination has allowed the team to retain personal, humanist edges in the finished atmosphere. Upon arriving, the building feels inherently significant, with exposed historic bricks and cloister-like arches. The main space exhibits now-familiar hospitality contrasts: contemporary furniture and an immaculate bar-top cohabit with the coarse, naked walls. That said, an industrially-futuristic rotary vacuum ‘rotovap’ still hangs out in the corner like a sleeping robot. No big deal.

Your eyes move around the room, fascinated by how oddly uncomplicated the intriguing environment is. Seating and tables are given plenty of their own space. The bar is more of a carefully-fashioned counter, its height deliberately chosen to suggest a comfortable kitchen table to guests while being a natural workbench for the bartender. One vintage display case contains the entire back-bar; Kyros & Co.’s tight spirit range is efficiently arranged into a configuration smaller than most book collections.

There’s no casual menu drop and minute of solitude. Here, they want to know you and your preferences. You’re introduced to the bar and guided towards making informed drink choices. The absence of a menu might throw you a little, but only until you realize what good hands you’ve landed in. Kyros works hard to make you trust them. By your first sip, you most likely will.

Classics are in focus, but ingredients reflect the seasons, and the house-serves thus excite while they experiment. Refreshingly, drinks without alcohol are not relegated to second thought. The team crafts a sensational range, flavoured and scented often more powerfully than their alcoholic siblings (I strongly recommend you try their non-alcoholic version of the classic negroni). This kind of detailed execution is ubiquitous. The house-made bitter cordial has twenty-nine herbs and spices. They want you to know they give a damn.

The comprehensive syrups, bitters, and infusions are impressive, but not unexpected. However, the unique house-made spirits break new ground. The aforementioned rotovap isn’t a display exhibit — it operates frequently. Chances are that the drink you and the host chose together just now contains produce distilled just a few metres from you.

“I’m trying to explore flavour here, with whatever medium I can find to use. I’m not keen on constraints, which is perhaps my biggest motivation to use a rotovap to make my own spirits to sit beside the supplied ones. The point of being able to distil is to have the chance to realize a conceptual idea, to bring it to life, right in the bar. That’s something I’m very grateful for.”

– Christian Tang, Big Cheese

Dialogue-led bars are established in the wine scene, but Kyros & Co. is the only present one to serve cocktails in Copenhagen. Every visit to the bar is a new experience, an escapist adventure from expected routine. No grounding oneself with beers or wines; this is an easy flight out of your comfort zone. Seatbelts, please.